I believe somewhere between TBC and Cata is when this kind of gameplay was introduced, while at the same time is when the game was peaked. Since then to now, the numbers dropped drastically. Idk if it’s the gameplay, the game is a few decades old and people moved on, or if people followed the lore more than end content, but it’s not what it use to be.
This isn’t what OP is referring to. They are specifically referring to the seasonal structure that has pervaded this game since Legion/BfA, where everything is now about climbing ladders and pushing higher and higher difficulties for marginal returns.
WoW in 2004 was explicitly about the experience, and even at its most competitive, it was never the focal point.
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Are you a MOP baby or something? This is Literally ALL Vanilla was. Vanilla was so much “Competitive Gameplay” that News outlets were doing stories on all the Divorces the game was causing due to people feeling like they needed give up their social lives to play.
As for WoW now days… I would Argue that wow has evolved to the point where WoW is what YOU make it and how YOU want to play. Heck even for solo players like me TWW is the most RPG/Solo Player friendly expansion in WoW’s History
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It’s not even about competitive gameplay.
No one watches any of the esports.
Mop remix is a knuckle dragging event with mind numbing gameplay and cosmetic giveaways.
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Its been a thing since Day one release of vanilla the moment one player requested a duel.
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the game was never about that even in 2004. you are kinda naive here . neck beards were always there min maxing and raiding with 40 people
The seasonal structure is just a new term for raid tiers
Which is what we had before.
Exactly! Like I said above…
Anyone who thinks otherwise didnt Play in Vanilla even though they “claim” they did 
This has been the focus since vanilla. Your anecdotal experience of just aimlessly experiencing the game, isn’t really a sign of what the average experience is.
The focus early is to level, the game rewards your with more power for doing so. Eventually you are compelled to get better gear, which leads you to dungeons. Eventually you seek out better gear, which leads you to raids in old wow, or raids/mplus in the new.
It’s all just incentives playing out like anything else in life. The competition comes primarily from how endgame grouping functions. DPS with bad parses and bad gear, don’t get invited, so they have to compete to get into groups. Increasingly good tools have been made that make it easier for groups to spot bad players before even inviting them, which increases the competition even more.
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Again, yes it was lol
The existence of a specified subsect of players is not evidence that the game was always like this lol
WoW simply had more to it in 2004 than raiding and running dungeons ad nauseam. This is what OP is referring to. There wasn’t just raiding or PvP or M+ (which didn’t even exist back then). You could play WoW back then without ever setting foot in a raid and still have a fulfilling experience because the game had more to it than being a lobby simulator.
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Once it had Min/Max stats. So, forever?
What form of content was available then which is not available now?
PvP was always one of the big selling points of WoW.
The introduction of Achievements might have stunted the evolution of immersive aspects of the game, because they are so not immersive.
it’s kinda amusing that blizzard did a whole classic wow , and people still ask for “old school” wow . classic wow and vanilla is there go and play it. if you can not find likeminded people it’s not blizzards fault , it s probably because we all enjoy the game on retail
It really didn’t though? The only major difference was that it was significantly harder to find information, so most people were wildly uninformed, and spent significantly longer trying to finish quests.
The grind to 60 was also much much longer as a result, so most casual players with only say, 5 hours a week to play, might have only just been hitting 60 extremely late in vanilla’s patch cycle.
We will never get that back, thanks to abundance of information. Not unless they revert all of the QOL fast leveling changes, which would drive off new players like almost no other change.
No, I’ve been around since Vanilla, and that’s not what I meant. I get most folks don’t read through the actual comments of a discussion these days, but being committed to the game isn’t how the discussion has referred to competitive play. It’s the sportifying of the content.
This is a really bad attempt to set up some sort of “gotcha.” I know what you’re trying to do, and it’s a bad move on your part lol
Because yeah, obviously the content that existed in 2004 WoW still exists today. There’s still leveling and an open world to explore/quest in, so at a very surface level, the game is still the exact same.
Except you and I both know that’s not true. Anyone with eyes would be able to recognize that the open world is a shell of what it used to be, and leveling is effectively an afterthought with very little sense of progression (in part due to level scaling and in part due to the lack of meaningful gear acquisition while leveling). OP explicitly states this as the problem: The rest of the game is extremely hollow in comparison to what it used to be, and the only thing that matters now is sitting in the capital while you wait for your group to fill up for your next key.
Nobody is saying this content doesn’t exist anymore. They’re saying this content is extremely bad compared to how it used to be.
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Ok. How was the content better?
You give really strong statements on the design of the game changing, but nothing to back it up. With some weird back pedaling.
“The game wasn’t designed to be competitive!”
Followed by
“Ok. People were competitive with the content. But they don’t like…count.”
“There were more things to do outside of raiding!”
Followed by
“Ok the same content exists…it’s just not as good”
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You’re never getting that back, because one of the largest barriers to new players, aka, new customers. Is arriving and finding out they have to do X, before they can do Y with their friends.
It would be neat if leveling was still a meaningful progression thing, but that’s dead for very real reasons. Just like it’s dead in most MMOs. The only holdout is the main story quest slog in FF14.
I agree, Robu.
Humans are competitive by nature…
So it was always up to the developers
to accommodate for that…to temper that,
but they didn’t, because they’re
competitive children themselves…
and that’s the sad truth of it.